AUSTIN, TEXAS — It’s been a roller coaster last few months for fringe right-wing media host Alex Jones. His InfoWars website gained national headlines and notoriety when Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, and Jones was figuratively by his side, as one of Trump’s top backers. But at the same time, two court battles were raging in his personal life, and this week Jones lost both.

The trial involving custody of his children with his estranged wife took a turn for the embarrassing when, in an attempt to cast himself in a favorable light in the courts, he claimed that all of what he does on his show is an elaborate performance art piece. On a special edition of his show, a crestfallen and clearly shaken Jones explained his dual courtroom defeats.

“It’s all over the place now, so I might as well address it folks,” Jones only half-heartedly screamed into his microphone, “I lost custody of my kids, sure. Everyone knows that. But those were my real kids. I also lost custody this week of the crisis actors who were playing my kids.”

A tearful Jones explained that when each of his children was born, he scoured the country for lookalikes. He knew, Jones said, that he might need to perpetrate his own false flag on the country, and the crisis actors he hired to play his kids would play a vital role.

“I already had experience being a conman huckster, selling a bullshit bill of goods to all you folks,” Jones said, “and all that came out in the trial for my real kids. But I’m not nearly as devastated about losing custody of my own kids as I am about losing custody of those sweet, sweet crisis actors.”

Jones told his audience that he had decided to hire little people — grown adults with smaller features — rather than real children. He said he made this decision because that way he could hire and fire the actors as he needed to and not feel any “sissy pussy libtard guilt” about firing children. But, over the years, Jones said he grew to love the crisis actors as if they were his own children.

“And now I’ve lost custody of them just when I might need to stage a hoax with them the most,” Jones half-assedly yelled into the mic, “and I just don’t know if I have the strength to carry on any of this charade anymore. So you know what? Yeah. It’s time to do this.”

Jones began peeling back layers of his own skin, or what had appeared to be his skin, away from his face.

Over the course of the next ten minutes, layer after layer of prosthetic latex makeup was peeled away from Jones’ face. With passing peel and scrape, he looked even more changed. Then, finally, he yanked off the last, hanging flap of dried latex and revealed his true form to everyone watching.

“There,” a nebulous, formless, cloud of sulfurous gas and racist conspiracy theories spoke into the mic, words mixing with fart noises, “I can finally shed my outer layers and be the life form everyone always thought I was to begin with.”